Real Words from
Poverty, USA

What does it mean to be poor in America? For four years, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development has posed this question to people in poverty across the nation, through its annual Low Income Survey. Their responses are poignant, anguished, desperate - real emotions and real words from real people in these United States, struggling to secure just the basic necessities in life. Read some of their answers below, and remember: for every one you read, there are 37 million more Americans still living in poverty, still waiting to be heard.

What does it mean to be poor in America?

"It means having to do without basic needs. It means being last, forgotten, judged wrongly by others."
Male, 44, Delaware, household of three, income less than $8,860

"To me, it is not being poor in itself that holds any meaning; it is seeing all the wealth in others, and of our nation, that makes your feel poor -- like living within many states of hopelessness."
Male, 40, California, household of nine, income less than $8,860.

"Hopeless."
Male, 58, Delaware, household of one, income less than $8,860

"Being unseen and unheard."
Female, 70, Washington, household of one, income of $8,860 to $11,939

"You are voiceless and somewhat powerless to change your situation, because you are too busy trying to survive to make the changes you need to improve your situation."
Female, 40, Washington, household of one, income less than $8,860

"I'm a senior, disabled, all alone, no money, sit in front of T.V. all day - why? Too poor to socialize. Poverty is like being in prison. Why even try to stay alive? For what?
Female, 62, Oregon, household of one, income less than $8,860

"You are treated as a second class citizen."
Male, 47, Oregon, household of one, income less than $8,860

"Heartbreaking. I worry about when I become elderly, sometimes I feel that my concerns, my voice isn't heard."
Female, 44, no state, household of two, income less than $8,860

"It's unbearable. It's like you have no reason to exist. Everywhere you go you get turned away."
Male, 45, Illinois, household of five, income of $11,940 to $15,019

"It feels as if you are the lowest creature on earth and rich people look down at you over their noses."
Male, 66, Pennsylvania, household of three, income of $15,020 to $18,099

"Struggling to pay bills, constant disconnection notices, not having money to wash and purchase clothing to work in because bills and household needs have to come first. Listening to your children say they are hungry, but not knowing what you are going to be able to give them before your foodstamps come."
Female, 32, Missouri, household of five, income of less than $8,860

"I am poor so I know poverty. It's wearing tattered clothes and shoes and having to bow my head in the face of injustice and oppression."
Male, 55, Florida, household of two, income of less than $8,860

"Poor = helpless. Poor + Black = helpless, hopeless. Poor + Black + female + Catholic = encouraged fighter."
Female, 62, Ohio, household of two, income of $11,940 to $15,019

"People look down on you, thinking that you're nothing, like not one poor person tried in their life."
Female, Kansas, 16, household of three, income of less than $8,860

"Not having the American Dream."
Female, 49, New York, household of three, income of less than $8,860

"Not having enough money to have a nice Christmas. Not being able to have nice things for birthdays."
Female, 23, Michigan, household of one, income of less than $8,860

"Feeling like you always owe everyone either an apology or an explanation or both."
Female, 52, Kansas, household of four, income of less than $8,860

"Being poor in the U.S. today is very rough and scary."
Female, 36, Kansas, household of two, income of less than $8,860

"Looked over by most (due to fear), forgotten, seeing the richest people in the world while hungry and cold, feels alone and invalid."
Male, 31, California, household of six, income of $8,860 to $11,939

"It means I lost life as I knew it."
Male, 36, California, household of one, income of less than $8,860

 

Poverty USA: The Working Poor

More than two-thirds of all poor families with children included one or more individuals who worked in 2003. What’s more, family members in working-poor families with children typically worked combined totals of 46 weeks per year.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines poor families as those with cash incomes of less than $15,067 a year for a family of three – or $19,307 for a family of four.

Since 2000 – the last year before unemployment began to rise – the number of people in poverty has risen by 5.4 million, median income has fallen by $1,535 after adjustment for inflation, and the number of people with no health insurance has increased by 5.2 million.

In 2004, the number of people living in extreme poverty, that is, with incomes below half the poverty line, remained the same at 15.6 million people. The number of Americans living in extreme poverty reached the highest level on record, since data first became available in 1975.

The average amount by which poor people’s incomes fell below the poverty line was greater in 2004 than any other year since recordkeeping began in 1975. The average amount by which the poor fell below the poverty line was $7,775 per family in 2004.

A single parent of two young children working full-time in a minimum wage job for a year would make $10,712 before taxes - a wage $4,355 below the poverty threshold set by the federal government. (U.S. Department of Labor; U.S. Census Bureau.)

About 40 percent of poor single-parent, working mothers who paid for child care paid at least half of their income for child care; an additional 25 percent of these families paid between 40 and 50 percent of their incomes for child care. (Child Trends, 2001.)

While the Census figures reveal a significant number of Americans living in poverty, many experts feel that the measures used by the federal government drastically underestimate the real scale of poverty in America - primarily because the official poverty thresholds are considered "too low." Many experts believe a more realistic poverty threshold for a family of four would be in the area of $30,000 a year - and that a more accurate estimate of the poverty rate in America would be 30% of the total population. (Economic Policy Institute, 2001.)

Opportunities for those trying to work their way out of poverty are dwindling; by September 2003, 2.1 million American jobless workers - nearly a quarter of the total unemployed population - had been out of work for half a year or more - the highest level in 20 years. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 2003.)

Who Pays For Poverty?
Critics questioned welfare reform during the prosperous '90s, but the real crisis is emerging in the wake of the Bush recession.
By Mark Engler
Published on September 8, 2003

The success of welfare reform is a faith-based proposition in Washington, D.C. This month, as lawmakers debate the reauthorization of welfare legislation, the conservatives on Capital Hill will offer their regular sermon on the virtues of "personal responsibility," ignoring the steady hemorrhage of jobs from the economy. And since welfare reform was a major legislative focus of President Clinton's "New Democrats," the other side of the aisle is unlikely to question the underlying belief that "ending welfare as we knew it" represented a triumph in social policy.

Out in the real world, however, the jobless recovery and enfeebled social protections are increasingly set on a collision course. Local legislators must confront an ugly truth about their "reformed" welfare systems: If critics charged that cutting welfare rolls had harmful impacts during the prosperous 1990s, the true extent of the damage is only emerging in the wake of the Bush recession.

"Yeah, there are lots of jobs available," went a joke about the workforce in the Clinton era: "I've got three of them." Since then, real wages haven't improved noticeably and extra work is harder to come by. Nonfarm payroll employment has dropped steadily since November 2001, shedding 579,000 jobs so far this year.

Clinton's 1996 welfare reform replaced the cash entitlement-based Aid for Families with Dependent Children with the new Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Research suggests that in the context of the faltering economy, people who might have once received AFDC are far more likely to find entrenched poverty than living-wage work. Single mothers are in truly desperate straits according to a new report released by the Children's Defense Fund. "The number of jobless women with children not receiving welfare rose by 188,000 in one year, leaving a record three quarters of all single mothers without public assistance and causing a sudden surge in extreme child poverty," the report states. "Single parents entered the 2001 recession with less protection from a failing economy than in any recession in the last 20 years."

The details of this debacle get complicated. Under TANF, individual states receive block grants that allow them to customize their welfare systems. (As the late social theorist Teresa Brennan put it, there are now "50 Ways to Leave Your Welfare Benefits.") But Wisconsin's flagship W-2 program provides a revealing example. The program, which helped former Governor Tommy Thompson land a job as Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, is generally lauded as a success for cutting the number of families receiving cash assistance in half. The real results have been mixed at best.

A largely unnoticed AP story in May showed that W-2 was considerably more expensive for Wisconsin than the old welfare program. Although the state served fewer people, the welfare system cost $276.9 million more in the most recent budget period than during the last year of AFDC.

So what ever happened to "the end of big government"? Wisconsin realized that if you're going to force mothers to enter the job market rather than stay home to take care of their kids, you have to make provisions for child care. Under TANF in Wisconsin, the demand for child care has grown by 160 percent. (Ironically, many women entering the low-wage workforce end up stuck in jobs taking care of other peoples' kids, which, at hourly pay rates that make McDonald's look generous, isn't lifting anyone up by their boot straps.) Nor does job training come cheap. As Tommy Thompson himself has noted, if you want to create a "welfare-to-work" program that amounts to more than rhetoric, you have to be willing to pay for it.

Even with the extra expenditures, Thompson's brainchild is nothing to cheer about. Food pantries, emergency homeless shelters, and charitable hospitals all saw demand for their services shoot skyward between 1997 and 2000, according to groups like the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Institute for Wisconsin's Future. In the same period, forcible evictions in Milwaukee increased by more than 200 percent. And when the state's Department of Workforce Development surveyed former AFDC recipients, they found 68 percent of those who had "successfully" found work said they were "just barely getting by day to day."

So much for the boom years of the Clinton administration.

The real problem is that most states are not even doing as well as Wisconsin, having failed to make the same investments. Instead of receiving cash assistance, many families are simply getting no help at all. In fact, the percentage of eligible families who actually receive welfare benefits plunged from 84 percent in 1995 to 52 percent in 1999, according to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Michael New at the Cato Institute writes that "states with the strongest sanctions and the lowest benefit levels had the most success in reducing their caseloads." He's right. But slashing welfare rolls and reducing poverty are not the same thing. The current system is all too ready to reward states for the former.

Welfare reform in practice means that in tough economic times -- the very times welfare is needed most -- the government has little to offer the poor and the jobless. Those wealthy enough to walk away with one of President Bush's huge tax cuts aren't complaining. Nor are corporations who can hire from an expanding pool of low-wage workers. But the rest of us, who find our jobs ever less secure and our community resources strained, are left to pay for poverty.